The UN in Haiti: A Horrendous Loss

By Barbara Crossette

The presidential palace in Port-au-Prince. UN Photo/Logan Abassi.

Jan. 20 -- The earthquake that tore apart the heart of Haiti on Jan. 12 struck with cruel ferocity at the United Nations, crippling its large mission there, collapsing its headquarters and killing many of the people most capable of providing life-saving relief to millions of Haitians. It was the largest catastrophic blow that the UN itself has suffered in its nearly 65-year history, and the worst natural disaster it has ever faced.

In barely a minute of terror, the worst earthquake in two centuries to hit Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, took the lives of several hundred of the roughly 9,000 UN peacekeeping troops and UN civilian staff in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince. Among the dead were the UN's chief of mission, Hédi Annabi, and his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa, a Brazilian, and the mission's acting police commissioner, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The UN issued a statement on Jan. 16 confirming the men’s deaths.

In Haiti on Sunday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the relief effort would “proceed under the leadership of the government of Haiti.” Reading from a text, he said: “I’m here to say, We are here to help you. You are not alone.” He arrived at the devastating scene of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (called MINUSTAH for its initials in French), at the ruins of the Christopher Hotel, with Edmond Mulet, the assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations and a former head of the Haiti mission.

After Five Days, a UN Employee Is Rescued

Mulet was sent from New York last week after the earthquake to take charge of the UN's operations, which have entered a body recovery phase, with little hope left for rescuing living missing UN personnel. Yet just after Ban left the MINUSTAH site, a Danish civilian employee was pulled alive from the concrete rubble, pale and emaciated and placed on a stretcher, even able to provide bits of information on others still buried under the slabs.

Twenty-five UN search-and-rescue teams are on the scene in Haiti, along with other expert teams from around the world. On Tuesday, the Security Council, meeting at UN headquarters in New York, authorized the addition of 3,500 peacekeepers to bolster security in Port-au-Prince, where looting and some street violence has been taking place. The secretary-general had asked the council for 1,500 more police offices and 2,000 troops. The council agreed, and said that it would continue to monitor the situation should more troops be needed.

Help the UN Help Haiti

UNA-USA Members Pitch In

A roll call of UN agencies -- including the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, Unicef, the Population Fund and the UN Development Program -- have been struggling to return to work in Haiti, along with many nongovernmental international relief groups. UN agencies have quickly concentrated on their specialties, with Unicef, for example, flying in plane loads of sanitation supplies, clean water and oral rehydration supplies, which can save the lives of many children who have been without food and water or who have become ill in a hot and rapidly deteriorating tropical environment. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, with its considerable experience in refugee flows, will be erecting tent cities for those who lost their houses and possessions in the earthquake. More than a dozen hospitals have been set up by the World Health Organization to serve as many as possible the hundreds of thousands of people in need of medical attention.

Up to 200,000 Haitians are thought to have died in the earthquake and its aftermath. The final death toll may never be known since thousands of bodies are being disposed of without efforts to identify them, media reports say. The Haitian government said that bodies decomposing in the streets and buildings days after the 7.0-magnitude quake struck posed a health hazard.

Annabi, a Highly Respected Envoy

Annabi of the UN mission and others died in a disaster that, while very different in cause, eerily echoes the death of another UN head of mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, in the bombing and sudden collapse of UN headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. Annabi, like Vieira de
Mello, was considered one of the UN's leading envoys and most versatile political analysts.

Most recently, on Jan. 7, Annabi pledged that the UN would assume responsibility for logistics and security for a pair of upcoming Haitian elections. The first, for the country’s legislature, was scheduled to occur on Feb. 28.

Over the years, the Security Council as well as the media heard many cogent, trustworthy briefings from Annabi, a 28-year UN veteran from Tunisia, on a wide range of crises and geopolitical issues. Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking from Geneva as he recalled Annabi's services to the UN, referred to him as "one of my right-hand men."

Annabi, 65 years old when he died and a member of Tunisia's foreign service, held degrees in English language and literature from Tunis University; in political science from the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris; and in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. He joined the UN in 1981. He was much admired as a soft-spoken intellectual who did not seek publicity but was always willing to talk straight about whatever crisis the UN faced.

At the UN, Annabi, who had many friends in the organization and in the New York diplomatic corps, had served in numerous important posts, beginning in the office for Southeast Asian humanitarian affairs. From 1982 to 1991, he was involved in creating an internationally accepted political settlement for Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge period and a Vietnamese occupation.

In 1993, he became director of the peacekeeping department’s Africa division, and in 1997 he was appointed assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping operations. He was appointed to the Haitian mission in 2007, succeeding Mulet, a Guatemalan.

Security of UN Employees

After the bombing in Baghdad and a terror attack on the UN in Algiers in 2007, in which 27 people were killed and a North African branch of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for it, questions will again be asked about the effectiveness of UN safety and security. An earthquake cannot be precisely predicted and was not considered likely in Haiti, but the structure of the five-story Christopher Hotel in Port-au-Prince, where the UN mission was headquartered, may have been shoddy and unable to withstand tremors or blasts -- a powerful bomb, for example.

In the Baghdad bombing, which killed 22 people, including Arthur C. Helton, a refugee specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American rescue team at the scene said that the UN did not have any equipment there needed for an operation in exactly the kind of crisis it faced, a problem that most likely incurred more deaths.

The current UN mission in Haiti was established by the Security Council in 2004 at the request of Caribbean nations, after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (a former populist priest whom the US restored to office in 1994 after an earlier coup) was forced from power again amid widespread chaos and accusations that his government had become ineffectual and corrupt. The mission, led by a succession of Brazilian military officers, had spent most of the last five years attempting to restore order, reduce street violence and rebuild a functioning state.

In only a minute, an earthquake has set back all those efforts.

Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.

Keywords:

Haiti, earthquake, Ban Ki-moon, Edmond Mulet, World Health Organization, World Food Program, Hedi Annabi, Kofi Annan, UN Baghdad bombing, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Algiers bombing, Christopher Hotel, Port-au-Prince, Unicef, United Nations Development Program, UN Peacekeeping, MINUSTAH, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Security Council, Luiz Carlos da Costa, Doug Coates